


Blur

by damnslippyplanet



Series: Breaking Strength [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: But Let's Be Real People Still Gonna Get Murdered, Emotional Idiots Trying to Learn To Use Their Words, Hannibal is Hannibal, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, This Is That Kind of 'Verse, dark!Will, murder besties, who is also confused and poor life choice making Will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-16 00:18:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5805898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d been content enough with their status quo before Will had blown it up spectacularly.  It hadn’t been everything, but it had been enough.  But now, he doesn’t think he can go back.  Not now that he knows for sure things he’d only let himself imagine before - how perfectly they fit together and how Will tastes. So Hannibal has no idea what he’s driving into.  Only that whatever it is, it is some new form of Will that he can’t predict.  And that he’s never been anything but helpless against Will’s chameleon transformations.</p><p>On temporary hiatus right now for <a href="http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/143343331801/got-a-couple-of-questions-recently-about-the">wonky brain reasons</a> but is NOT abandoned, I promise, I will finish this story if I have to do it from my deathbed which, hopefully, will not be the case.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

For the first two days, Will doesn’t think.  Not about Hannibal, not about the people they’ve killed together, not about Jeremy’s accusatory eyes before the sheet draped over them, not about how pretty much every bit of this is his fault if you squint at it hard enough, not about anything.  He’s just  _ running _ and running hard.

If he gets caught, he’ll have plenty of time to think about his more questionable life choices in a series of cells, cages, and courtrooms.  He decides to prioritize staying free over anything else.  That’s what the plan calls for. And thank god there’s a plan and that they went over and over it, because he’s such a disaster right now that he’s really not sure what he’d be doing if it weren’t already laid out for him.

Since it is, all he has to do is drive.  Eventually he’ll head for the Northwest in a looping, circuitous path, but for now it’s pretty much just a straight line to put distance between himself and his crimes.  As much distance as possible, as fast as possible, so he drives through the night and well into the next day.  He fuels up on foul-tasting energy drinks paid for with cash in a furtive stop at a convenience store, where he tries to avoid facing the security cameras without being too obvious about it.

Driving is good.  It takes up his attention and eats up the minutes and hours and lets him pretend that he’s leaving behind everything that went so horribly wrong.  He turns on some music for company but doesn’t actually listen to it, and watches the miles stretch out behind him.  

He can’t stop himself from breaking down the timeline; he knows it too well.  By now the hotel will have broken into the room, when he didn’t check out and didn’t answer phone calls or polite knocks on the door.  They’ll have called the police, and there’ll be a crime scene, but the evidence may not be processed yet.  Depending on the equipment and people available locally, they may not have gotten far enough to have his name, or Hannibal’s.  Or maybe they do, and Jack’s already on a plane.

Will’s lips quirk into something like a smile without any actual amusement behind it, and he wonders for the millionth time just how much Jack regrets ever calling him back into the field.  Much less setting him up with Hannibal Lecter for psychiatric care.  He sincerely hopes never to be in a room with Jack Crawford again, but if it ever happens, he’ll be sure to ask. 

In the meanwhile, exhaustion is starting to kick in.  Caffeine only works for so long, once the adrenaline wears off.  He runs the mental calculation of “am I far enough away to rest?” vs. “if I don’t rest, am I going to drift off the road?” and decides stopping is the safer option.

Eventually he finds the sort of blandly anonymous hotel that doesn’t blink when he pays cash. He locks the door behind him, and falls into bed fully clothed without bothering to get under the blankets.  Unconsciousness comes for him so quickly he doesn’t have time to be reminded of other hotel rooms he’s been in recently, and he’s vaguely grateful before he’s gone.

The next day is more of the same, just a mindless persistent race to get  _ away, _ precluding thoughts of anything else.  A car switch partway through the day, a moment’s dry amusement at all the things he picked up as a cop and an profiler that turn out to be very useful as a wanted criminal, and he just keeps going.

On the third day, though, and the days that follow, the pressure eases up a little.  He’s still being careful but he’s fairly sure that at this point he’s got a better chance of staying un-caught, having made it this long.  Which means he can start a confused route toward his actual destination, looping and backtracking and making unnecessary side trips through barren countrysides and small towns and bustling cities.  Hell, he could stop and see the world’s biggest ball of twine once he gets to Kansas if he wanted to, there’s plenty of time.

No sooner does he think of that than he tries to imagine Hannibal doing the same thing, stopping to have his picture taken at the twine ball or any of the other tourist traps he’ll be passing along the way, and that breaks his resolve to  _ just not think. _

Which leads him right back to  _ what the fuck, Graham?, _ a steady refrain of it as he drives through a pouring rainstorm somewhere around Memphis.  

Two weeks and some change and, luck permitting, he’ll meet up with Hannibal again.  Needs to - they’re far too deep under each other’s skins now to survive separately.  But something’s going to have to change because they can’t go on this way.  If nothing else, they can’t keep having to drop everything and flee for their lives every time one of them loses their temper. 

And then there’s the bloodshed.  Will’s the first to admit his moral code is something close to “nonexistent” these days. It bled out of him sometime around the moment Hannibal took a bite out of Francis Dolarhyde and Will’s entire body had hummed with some sort of electricity and he’d thought wildly  _ oh. Oh, god. How did I not know it would be like this? _  It hadn’t even been about sex that time, or mostly not. That had come the second time they killed together.  That first time had been something more transcendent than any simple human drive, and whatever Will Graham had been before it was gone. 

So it’s not really so much that Jeremy was an  _ innocent _ that bothers him.  It does tug a little at what remains of his capacity for guilt, but they’ve killed people nearly as innocent together on extremely flimsy pretexts. 

He interrogates himself as the miles roll away.

_ What is it that’s bothering you then, Graham? _

\- How personal it was.  It wasn’t about Jeremy at all, it was about  _ us. _ He was just...fallout, and that seems wrong. 

_ Okay, but isn’t it always, a little bit, about you and Hannibal? Isn’t it always personal? Would you feel the way you do about it if it were impersonal? _

He taps a finger on the steering wheel and worries at his lower lip with his teeth and thinks about that for a while.

_ What else, then?  _

\- The danger of it.  Unplanned, unpredictable violence like that.  We can’t keep that up.  We’d run out of safe places to run to within a few weeks. 

_ You’d leave a trail of bodies so clear the FBI would have to find you. But it might be worth it. You’d have a glorious few weeks, knee-deep in carnage. You could always commit suicide-by-cop when they finally catch you, if you don’t want to get locked away. _

Will begins to think his inner voice is maybe not such a good voice to be listening to right now.  

He pulls over at the next rest stop even though he’s not really hungry, just to be out of the car and around other people for a while.  To soak up some normality.  He lingers over an unfortunate chicken sandwich longer than is probably wise, just watching people come and go on the way to and from normal lives.  He doesn’t even think about killing anyone. Much.

He spends the rest of the three weeks more or less the same way.  They’re an endless, blurring, disorienting series of drives, interchangeable hotel rooms, the kind of road trip food he used to be just fine with and has apparently gotten snobby about with Hannibal cooking for him all the time, and his ongoing debate with his own mind.

By the time he draws near to Seattle, he’s argued every possible angle he can think of with himself during the long lonely hours of driving.  He’s reached a few conclusions, or at least a few questions that seem to be worth further exploration.

First,  _ something _ has to change and it probably needs to start with him finding some way to voice at least some of the mess in his head to Hannibal.  That may do some good, or it may end up with either Will or Hannibal on the floor in a pool of blood, but at least it should minimize additional collateral damage.

Second, he considers his own malleability.  Intentionally or unintentionally, he’s always become partly what other people wanted to see in him.  He’s usually hated it, but then it’s always felt forced on him.  Never something he asked for.  He wonders, if he  _ asked _ for it and let it happen, what Hannibal could shape him into?  He considers what it would feel like to say  _ make me not be like this. Make me just want, like a normal person. Or make me not want at all. _ He has to assume given the option, Hannibal would go for the former. Maybe that would be just fine. Maybe together they could shape Will into something less broken, or at least differently broken.

Third, and least pleasant to think about, there’s a phone call he needs to make.  There’s a card tucked in his go-bag, a number printed on it in Hannibal’s effortlessly perfect script.  He’d laughed at the thought that he might ever use it, but Hannibal had insisted he have it, in case of emergency where it might be of some use.  This seems like it might be an emergency.  

He doesn’t check for the card but he’s sure it’s still there.   _ B.D., _ and the number.  Presumably Bedelia’s changed her number (and her address, if she’s smart) since they paid her a visit, but Will’s also fairly sure Hannibal would have his ways of getting the new number.

He should hit Seattle tomorrow.  He’ll stop and pick up a burner phone, and a few extra changes of clothing, outside of the city.  And then he’ll make the phone call he really doesn’t want to make. And then assuming he survives that, he'll see whether Hannibal's made it to town before him. 


	2. Chapter 2

Compartmentalizing generally comes easily to Hannibal.  He’d learned it as a young man, as the only way to stay sane in light of his past (for certain definitions of “sane”, anyway, his thick case file at the BSHCI notwithstanding).  In his adulthood it was simply a convenience.  It was easier to shift back and forth between Ripper and psychiatrist, mentor and murderer, friend and betrayer, when the boundaries between them were clean so it was always clear which the moment called for.  

As that had become more difficult after Will's release from the institution, he had found it harder to look at the man sitting across from him at the dinner table night after night.  He’d found himself captive to the new feeling of a slippery, shifting line between different and conflicting desires.  Kiss the man and you can’t kill him; kill him and you can’t kiss him. Sometimes he’d found himself wanting both in the same breath, wanting more things than he could possibly have, filled with an unaccustomed yearning to be more than one thing at once.  

And so at some point, he had stopped shifting.  Finally  _ seen _ by Will, seen in all his incarnations and right down to his marrow, it became much harder to selectively show only parts of himself.  Harder to compartmentalize.  The sharp clean edges of his life had blurred and collapsed in on themselves.

Hannibal tells himself as he leaves the hotel, the house, and the city that this is why it is much harder to be calm than it should be.  That he had known how to be calm once, and can surely find that within himself again.

Its isn’t the first time Hannibal’s made an abrupt departure with law enforcement on his heels.  He knows how to do it. He trusts Will to handle himself in his own flight.  There’s nothing to worry about, nothing that should make his heart pound.

Even so, it beats in his chest like a wild thing caged and flinging itself at the bars.

Hannibal runs, and he hides, and he switches license plates and clothes and names with the ease of practice.  He searches the news for hints that they’re being sought, and is not even slightly surprised when Freddie Lounds is the first to print.  He frowns at the picture of him she’s chosen, and lingers over the picture of Will.  

He listens to Bach while he drives, except in the car that turns out to have a broken sound system, which he swaps out for another as soon as he can safely do so.  He drives with the window open and the sun on his face and the wind in his hair, and delights at his continued freedom.  When he must eat in some roadside diner, he retreats into his memory and lets the recollection of fine meals nourish his soul even if his body must sate itself on less palatable things.

He sticks to the plan and it goes smoothly. And yet, he feels a million miles from calm.

In every moment of every day some part of him is reliving that brief, exquisite, shocky moment of Will pressed against him, stealing the air from his lungs.  He might think he’d dreamed the whole thing if it weren’t for the sore place on his lower lip where Will had bitten down.  He finds himself biting it open again and again, unwilling to let it heal until he has some other proof that it happened.  Until he knows he’ll see Will again. Until he knows whether Will is going to  _ stay. _

He’d been content enough with their status quo before Will had blown it up spectacularly.  It hadn’t been everything, but it had been enough.  But now he doesn’t think he can go back.  Not now that he knows for sure things he’d barely let himself imagine before - how perfectly they fit together and how Will tastes. The  _ sounds _ he had made. And the others Hannibal can no longer refrain from imagining he  _ might _ make, given the right incentives.

Hannibal has no idea what he’s driving into.  Only that whatever it is, it is some new form of Will that he can’t predict.  And that he’s never been anything but helpless against Will’s chameleon transformations. 

He lies awake every night, perfectly still, walking the rooms of his memory.  He plays the harpsichord there.  He remembers fine meals he’s served, and the ingredients he made them from. He visits art galleries again, and listens to only the best parts of his favorite operas.

And he relives and he relives and he relives Will Graham in his arms until he’s preserved it just right in his memories, until he can almost feel the individual ridges of Will’s fingerprints against his skin.  Until he aches with it, his mind back in that perilous, discomfiting place it used to find so often with Will, where Hannibal wants and wants and cannot have.

That’s the first week.  There’s no room for anything else.

In the second week he finds a little room to breathe and think and while he is still not calm, he’s not on fire either.  He shuffles through his extensive collection of memories of Will, looking for hints about what led up to this spectacular disaster of the last several days.  He tries to remember any time he’s seen Will display even a hint of genuine desire, instead of whatever pale imitation led him to those near-anonymous hotel room encounters. He thinks briefly about, and then dismisses, Will’s earlier frantic scrabbles at stability - Alana and Molly aren’t the clues he needs.  

In the end, he realizes, it comes down to what so many things do come down to. 

Blood. 

When he knows what he’s looking for, it’s not very difficult to trace the thread back.  It’s been there for so long, since Will had sat across from him trembling like a leaf, but not looking away, as he’d near-whispered  _ I liked killing Hobbs. _ He hadn’t meant it that way. Hadn’t liked it the way he’d come to like it later.  But there’d been a seed of something there.  Hannibal lingers on that memory, on the speckling of blood on Will’s glasses in the afternoon sunlight, before he puts it away again in the room where he stores that day.

He remembers the stable - he’d stopped Will from following through on killing then, but he’d felt Will’s pulse racing beneath his hand.  Will had faked a lot of things in those months, but he doesn’t have that kind of control over his body and he hadn’t been faking that.

Will had brought Randall Tier to Hannibal’s house, hands still bloody.  That night he hadn’t trembled and he hadn’t flinched under Hannibal’s touch and Hannibal hadn’t even needed to ask whether Will had liked it.  He’d have known even if he hadn’t felt that same racing pulse under his hands.

He remembers, of course and always, Francis Dolarhyde. Hannibal rather doubts he’ll ever experience anything else in his life to eclipse that particular memory.  Will’s raw savagery, his utter lack of hesitation or pretense at anything other than enjoyment, his bloodied face in the moonlight.

And then everything after.  The initial insistence on killing those who deserved it in some way giving way gradually, without explicit discussion, to killing whoever was convenient.  He’d watched and delighted in Will’s growing hunger for the kills - a hunger like his own, that somehow seemed to grow the more it was fed, rather than being sated.  

He just hadn’t quite realized what else he was seeing.  Will’s breath in little gasping pants, his eyes riveted to their victims, the way he’d  _ looked _ at Hannibal sometimes, after. And during.

Hannibal is not easily blinded, but he’d missed this.  Or perhaps he’d wanted so badly to see it that he’d convinced himself it couldn’t possibly really be there.  Must have been his imagination.

_ Will, _ he thinks, with a surge of an unfamiliar tenderness that makes him want to rip something apart.

He’d thought Will past the endless self-torture over issues of petty morality, but with the blinders lifted he can see perfectly clearly what knots Will must be tying himself into. To let himself be the killer he’d always been on the verge of being, would be one thing.  To let himself  _ enjoy _ it in that particular way...well.  

Hannibal can see why Will would have fled for the simpler, flatter pleasures of dim bars, inane conversation, and touch that doesn’t require human sacrifice. He can understand it, even, but he regrets that Will thought it necessary. 

Perhaps Will still has a few inhibitions left to lose.  Hannibal has very few inhibitions, and there isn’t much he wouldn’t do to see Will stripped of the last few of his.  Every time he thinks he’s reached the core of Will, there is further left to go.  It’s an endless fascination.

They need to lay low for a while, even once they’ve resettled.  They can’t leave any bodies to be found, any particularly suspicious disappearances.  It may take a while to figure out the best way to approach this. And he needs to be sure Will is going to stay, before any other considerations can even be on the table.

Fortunately, Hannibal has time.  Days of driving left, to think and plan.

Halfway across the country he’s formed a rough outline, although as with many of his plans, he leaves room for serendipity and inspiration.  To begin with, the plan requires a bit of deviation from the original get-away plan. He reviews a map and plans an alternate, faster route to Seattle to give himself a few days to work with. 

It’s raining and he can’t have the window down, but he’s still smiling the next morning as he turns off his intended route, in search of a more interesting one. For the first time in many days, he feels something approaching calm.


	3. Chapter 3

Will sits on the edge of the motel bed and then changes his mind, moving over to the desk chair. He doesn’t want to be comfortable, or anything approaching intimate, for this particular call. He would  _ like _ to be drunk for this particular call, but that seems unwise. He would  _ like  _ not to make the call at all, but he’s on the verge of burning down the last good thing in his life, the thing he gave up the rest for.

He’s  _ missed _ Hannibal, god help him. Not just the killing. Hannibal, fussing about things being out of place in the kitchen. Hannibal, sprawled like a particularly dangerous housecat in the living room. Hannibal, dragging Will to an endless series of plays and concerts and galleries that should be and almost are torture, but for his running commentary making them lively.

He winces, wishes for some aspirin to take pre-emptively against the headache he’s pretty sure is already starting to form somewhere in the darkness behind his eyes, and dials the number. Unsurprisingly, it rings and rings. He rather imagines Bedelia no longer answers unknown callers, if she ever did.

He waits for the voicemail - no name, just  _ please leave a message at the tone, _ but he knows the voice. He hardens his own voice as much as he can to say, “Bedelia. I’d like to speak with you, and I think we’d both rather do it by phone. I’ll call back in twenty minutes. Pick up the phone. If you make me schedule an in-person visit, I don’t think you’ll like it any better than the last dinner we shared.”

He drops the phone as soon as he’s ended the call, like something dirty or hot to the touch, and buries his head in his hands to wait out the twenty minutes. He has no intention of crossing the country again to pay her another visit, but she doesn’t need to know that. He just needs...well, a therapy session. And there’s no one else. His world has gotten so big and so small at the same time.

The minutes drag by and he reconsiders the wisdom of this entire endeavor, and then reconsiders his reconsidering. Then he reconsiders that, too. In the end, when the twenty minutes are over he picks up the phone simply because he’s not sure what the alternative is.

It rings twice, and then he hears a sigh on the other end of the line.

“Has life on the other side of the veil grown tiresome already?”  Her voice is steady as a rock. Will would bet a fair amount of money she’s clinging tightly to a wine glass, though. It can’t have been good for her, all these months of wondering if they’d be coming back for any additional limbs.

“Complicated might be a better term. How are you, Bedelia?”  He’s stalling, really, unsure what he wants to ask now that he’s here to ask it.

“I’m uninclined to share personal details with patients,” is her unruffled response. Will’s fingers twitch with an urge to choke the woman hard enough to get a response, any genuine response, from her. “I assume you’re calling in that capacity?”

Will grinds out his “Yes” like something cracking between his teeth. It tastes bitter. “I find myself in a situation to benefit from a therapy session.”

There’s a pause, and Will almost thinks he can hear a swallow of wine before she answers. “I saw a few lurid headlines, but I would prefer to hear it from you, if we must have this conversation. Assuming you’re at liberty to speak freely. Is Hannibal with you?”

She’s elaborately casual, performatively unconcerned. But she’s not as good at this as she used to be, or perhaps Will is better at seeing through it. Maybe eating someone’s leg in front of them provides insight. 

“He’s elsewhere at the moment.”  Will doesn’t elaborate. Let her wonder if Hannibal’s on his way toward her. If he’s standing outside her door waiting for a signal from Will. Putting Bedelia’s mind at ease is not the purpose of the call. “And I’m not interested in rehashing the lurid details. Whatever you saw was misguided, at best. It wasn’t what it looked like.”

A silence hangs in the air, the sort that’s uncomfortable enough in a therapy session but even more awkward when it leaves him wondering if Bedelia may have simply ended the call. Eventually she says, “It’s interesting that you’re reaching out for help but don’t wish to provide any details about the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re looking for me to intuit it, you’ll be disappointed. You two appeared to be on a particular path when we last...dined together. But it’s been some months and you were always a volatile combination. I wouldn’t dream of making any assumptions.”

“ _ Volatility _ has become a problem.”  He rolls her word around on his tongue to get the taste of it. It’s not wrong for what he and Hannibal are. As close as any other word he knows except for one or two he has no intention of saying to Bedelia. “Our situation has destabilized.”

He knows Bedelia would never unbend so far as to roll her eyes in a session but he can almost picture it anyway. Surely she’s  _ wanted _ to, once or twice. But he doesn’t get a hint of it in her voice when she says, “That was always a likely outcome. It’s interesting that you say ‘it’s destabilized.’  As if it happened on its own, without your participation.  Do you ever wonder whether you’re the wounded bird or the hand that smothers it?”

“I know what I am, Bedelia.”  Which, of course, is a filthy lie, and they both know it. If Will knew precisely what he was and accepted it, he wouldn’t be making this godforsaken phone call. His temples throb and it’s in that moment of distraction  _ (weakness) _ that he asks, “How did you do it? Stay with him and still stay separate enough to leave.”

Bedelia is silent for so long that he thinks the line might have gone dead. He doesn’t realize that she’s just relishing the question until she speaks and her voice drips with something like amusement, something like spite, when she says, “I didn’t fall in love with him. Which means I am not the therapist to provide the advice you’re seeking. Perhaps Alana Bloom would be a better choice, next time you have an urge to speak with your old life.”

He’s so tired. And he shouldn’t have made this call. There’s nothing Bedelia can tell him about how to live when Hannibal when you  _ don’t _ want to leave.

He’s pretty sure he says “Session’s over,” before he hits the button that ends the call. He pulls the battery out of the phone and drops it on the desk. He’ll get rid of both later on, but the headache’s coming on fast and it’s going to be a bad one. Blinding, probably; driving anywhere is an unwise idea with the blurry double vision he'll have soon.

He had thought he might make it the rest of the way to Seattle that night, to the safe house Hannibal maintains there that he’s never seen, but he’s not going anywhere. He crawls into bed, closes his eyes, and puts off dealing with the rest of his life for a few hours longer until the headache recedes enough to let him function again.

When he wakes it’s late, and he could get on the road but instead he just goes out long enough to get some aspirin, and to dispose of the cell phone. Then he spends the rest of the night blankly staring at something on TV. Later he doesn’t even remember what, except that there was a dog.

Somewhere toward dawn he falls into a fitful sleep for a few more hours.  When he wakes up, there’s bright daylight sneaking around the corners of the tightly-closed curtains.  He lies there and stares at it for a while without moving.

Once he actually gets his ass out of bed, the rest of his day will kick into motion.  The rest of his life.  He’ll have to take a shower, check out, find breakfast, get on the road, find the safe house.  Hope that either Hannibal’s already there, or that the hidden key is still where Hannibal told him to look for it if he arrived first.  He’s pretty sure Hannibal will already be there; the man’s too much of a control freak to let Will show up first and go poking around their new home without him there to give the grand tour. Bluebeard and his key ring and his secrets.

Hannibal will be there.  Will needs him to be there, so he will be.  It’s as simple - and as complicated - as that.

He’ll face it all.  Soon.  He’ll just lie there for a few minutes longer, first.


	4. Chapter 4

Hannibal had thought Will might arrive on Tuesday, but there’s no sign of him. He doesn’t worry about it. Will was very capable long before the two of them got tangled up in each other’s lives, and they’ve taught each other some tricks since. Hannibal meant his oath to hunt Will down if he doesn’t show up, but he’ll give him a few days first. Things happen on the road.

Besides, it gives him time to get the house in order. He opens windows to air out the musty smell and whisks slipcovers off furniture. He makes up the bedrooms with fresh bedding. He does a little inventory of the house’s amusements and finds them somewhat lacking; if they decide to stay, some restocking of bookshelves and wine stores will be in order. And perhaps at least a piano, even if a harpsichord would be a bit too conspicuous.

For now, he can read on his tablet and he’s brought home enough food and supplies to get through a few days. Assuming Will arrives reasonably promptly, that should be enough time to determine whether tensions have cooled enough to allow them to resume cohabitation. Then longer-term plans can be considered.

He spends Tuesday evening cooking far too much food for two people. It’s probably overkill, enough to feed a small army. But the sight of an empty refrigerator does things to the parts of Hannibal’s mind that he prefers not to spend time in. When that’s done he passes the evening quietly and pleasantly with a book and a few glasses of wine.

He stays up late just in case Will arrives, but in the end even Hannibal does need some sleep. He closes the windows and locks the door, ensuring there’s still a key hidden outside should Will arrive during the night. He does one more circuit of the house, cleaning and arranging and handling a few more tasks. He checks the back door as well, and the basement door, and then heads up to bed.

Wednesday passes similarly. Hannibal knows he had no intention of fretting until a few more days have passed. Even so, he finds it difficult to concentrate and he spends a fair amount of the day watching out the windows, or pacing the first floor. He spends some time walking in his memories as well, but wherever he starts out, his path through his memories always seems to end up in that hotel room where Will kissed him hard and deep amid the coppery scent of spilled blood.

It’s a much less productive day than the preceding one and he sleeps poorly.

By the next day he’s edging closer to worried, until shortly before noon he hears a car. It could be any car, up to and including Jack Crawford’s, but he knows it’s not with a certainty that he can’t justify in any way. He just knows. There’s a gravitational pull to it that tells him it couldn’t be anyone else.

He holds the door open for Will and his single duffel bag, as Will makes his way from the car. He looks tired and too thin, as if he hasn’t eaten enough or slept enough on the road. He looks like he’s still torturing himself senselessly.

They hang in the doorway for an awkward moment, neither sure what exactly an appropriate greeting is in this particular moment. Eventually Hannibal tries to smooth the way with an almost-formal, “Welcome home. I’m glad you made it here safely.”

He shuts and locks the front door behind Will and turns to meet a certain grateful relief in the other man’s grey-blue eyes, thankfulness that this isn’t going to be a fight or a push at Will’s boundaries, at least not right away. Will drops his bag the floor and smiles faintly and says, “Yeah. Me too. I always meant to try my hand at a cross-country road trip, but in my head there wasn’t going to be quite so much car theft.”

Hannibal studies him for a moment and then suggests, “I had planned to offer you a tour, but you look worn out. Can I get you something to eat first?”

That eases the tension a little; something familiar. Hannibal’s been trying to feed Will since their second meeting, and they’ve both worn comfortable grooves into that pair of roles. Will nods. “Yes, please. You can show me around later, though. I like the house from the outside. It seems quiet out here.”

Hannibal points Will toward the kitchen and its little countertop and stools. There’s a formal dining room but he’s trying to ease them back toward comfort, not further formality. He sits Will down on one of the stools with a glass of water and sets about reheating some of last night’s dinner.

He keeps busy warming up lunch for the two of them, eyes on his work, drawing Will into an almost-normal conversation about the route Will had driven, the weather and the cities and the monotony of hotels and junk food. Once lunch is ready he takes the seat next to Will - no eye contact required if they sit side by side, but the effort it takes not to brush arms or legs in the close space is difficult so that’s probably about a wash for Hannibal’s efforts at casualness - and spends the rest of their lunch regaling Will with his own tales from the road.

Hannibal’s always told a good story - it’s part of his protective coloration, a verbal slight-of-hand. _Don’t look at the meat, look at me; don’t dwell on why it doesn’t taste like anything you can place, just keep laughing and hanging on my every word._ The lies aren’t necessary with Will, and anyway this particular prosciutto really is prosciutto, but the habit remains and it serves Hannibal well now. He embellishes a few of his tales from the road enough to distract and relax Will, and to make him laugh once or twice. It starts to feel a little more like the comfortable ease they’d had between them a scant few weeks ago, before everything had slipped so far sideways, so fast.

They don’t talk about those last few days before their flight. They don’t talk about the newspaper headlines they surely both saw along the way, once the forensics teams had done their work and identified the killers of a man left dead in an anonymous hotel room. They don’t talk about whether Will feels the same electricity under his skin that Hannibal does, at sitting so close together after so long apart but not - quite - touching.

They don’t talk about a lot of things.

Hannibal’s itching to discuss every single one of them, but he was once a patient man, and he’s trying to remember how to be that again. If only because it seems like the surest route to what he actually wants.

After lunch Hannibal provides a brief tour of the house, which doesn’t take long. It’s closer in size to Will’s Wolf Trap house than Hannibal’s Baltimore one: two bedrooms, living and kitchen and dining areas. Grounds neatly cared for by a hired service, large enough and hemmed around with hedges enough to provide some privacy. It’s neither the fanciest nor the most humble of Hannibal’s assorted escape hatches.

Will doesn’t say much, other than a remark about how much he would have appreciated the single-floor layout all those weeks he’d been on crutches. But that way lies reminiscing about things that he quite apparently is not ready to talk about. So when he’s seen what there is to see - or what Hannibal is prepared to show him, because he’s still storytelling here - he fetches his bag from the entryway and hefts it awkwardly for a moment before turning to Hannibal. “Um,” he starts awkwardly, “I guess I’m going to unpack. I didn’t bring much; I picked up a few things along the way but I might need to do a little shopping soon.”

Hannibal tries not to sound expectant or hopeful or anything but neutral and perhaps curious as he says, “I can point you in the right direction, there are some stores nearby. Are you staying, then? I wasn’t entirely sure.”

Will grimaces, a fleeting uncomfortable expression, and drops his eyes. He seems to be struggling with words for a moment. Eventually he says, “Yes. I’d like… we should talk. Obviously. About what happened back there. I just, I’m really tired and it feels pretty good to not be looking over my shoulder. Could we maybe just wait a day or two? I could sleep for a year.”

Impatience isn’t going to serve Hannibal here, as much as he has a few very good reasons for not wanting to wait. Will really does look like he needs a break. He says, “Of course. When you’re ready.” By which he means more or less _I’m going to do my best to force this conversation tomorrow, but I can wait one more day._ But he must be hiding that successfully because Will looks grateful for the reprieve.

Will heads to the smaller of the two bedrooms with only a single backward look, but it’s one Hannibal can’t quite interpret. Worry? Guilt? Whatever it is, it’s something he would wipe out of Will’s repertoire of facial expressions forever if he could. Since he can’t, at least not just then, he lets Will go shut himself away behind a closed door. He returns to the kitchen to clean up the dishes, and tries to lose himself for a while in the soothing rituals of cleaning and restoring order to his space.

It works, a little, but he feels unsettled and restless. Relieved that Will is here, home with him. Concerned that Will is so off-balance. Calculating how he can best use that lack of balance to tip Will gently in Hannibal’s preferred direction, when he falls. Which he will, without or without Hannibal’s push. That much is clear enough; Will’s strung himself out almost to a breaking point.

Hannibal just needs to be sure Will breaks in exactly the way Hannibal wants him to.

It’s almost like old times again, he reflects, and finally for the first time that day Hannibal smiles.


	5. Chapter 5

Will spends most of the remainder of that first day in the second bedroom, which he supposes is now just “his room,” assuming that he’s going to be able to stay without any more unintended disasters. He tells himself he’s not hiding, he’s just indulging in the relief of not being on the run.  He doesn’t quite believe it.

He unpacks his small bag of belongings and then looks out the window for a while, taking in his new view.  It’s pleasant enough, a yard ringed with trees that prevents any immediate view of the neighboring house.

Then he lies back on the bed and tries to imagine ways he might open a conversation tomorrow.

_ We need to stop killing together.  I like it too much.  You can do it without me, if you want. _

_ There’s something very wrong with me.  I need you to fix me.  Drug me to the damn gills, flash your lights at me, I don’t care, just - make it go away. _

_ I’m losing my grip here and I don’t know what to do about it except that it can’t be what we’ve been doing.  Not unless you want to burn through whatever safe houses you have left really quickly. _

There isn’t really a script for this kind of thing.

Mid-evening, Hannibal knocks quietly at the door, bringing a light dinner and a warm, open, entirely genuine-sounding, “I’m very glad you’re here, Will.”  As if it’s as simple as a homecoming, as if their parting hadn’t been bloody and heated and entirely fucked-up.  Will thinks he manages some sort of thank-you.

Hannibal doesn’t press it; he goes back to whatever solitary pursuits he’s been up to, waiting for Will’s arrival. Eventually the long evening passes and Will falls into a restless sleep that does little to refresh him.

He wakes up to the familiar and missed smell and sounds of Hannibal in breakfast mode.  There’s clattering and sizzling and he’s briefly just  _ happy, _ before he can remember to be anything else.  It was easy enough, not that long ago, to forget all the things he shouldn’t want and just let things be mostly simple.  Mostly this.  Maybe they can write the past month off as a bit of temporary insanity and just go back to this.

Bolstered by that thought, Will showers and dresses and heads to the kitchen.  He arrives in time to find bacon keeping warm in the oven and omelette fixings waiting for his appearance.  He never has gotten the hang of omelettes, so he pours juice and then stays out of the way for Hannibal to do this thing, complete with unnecessary flourishes and a bit of leaping flame. 

If it were a normal morning, he might tease Hannibal about being a show-off. Instead, he busies himself looking through drawers and cupboards to find the necessities to set places for two.  He compliments the omelettes inanely when they arrive beautifully golden, dotted with peppers.

They have a few bites quietly, amid the clink of forks on plates, and then Hannibal breaks the silence with an overly casual, “Are you feeling rested enough for that discussion now?”

Will stabs a fluffy piece of egg with more violence than it really deserves, pops it into his mouth, and buys himself a few moments that way.  None of the possible answers are good. He thinks almost whimsically, half-hysterically,  _ the truth might be an entertaining change of pace, _ and says, “I’m never going to be rested enough for that discussion.  But we might as well have it before I get too comfortable.”

“Our home  _ should  _ be a place where you’re comfortable,” Hannibal says, and he sounds so fucking sincere that Will could just scream. 

He sounds like all he wants is whatever makes Will happy.  Which isn’t going to work. It’s not what Will needs, because what would make him happy is not okay.  Not at all. And trying to find something else that might make him happy led to the utter disaster that sent them both hurtling cross-country to begin with.  

Which is more or less what he tries to say, even though it comes out garbled and confused as he feels: “Comfortable might not be a good goal right now.  I was trying to figure out how to be comfortable back there, and look what happened.”

“Someone died.”  It’s blunt and entirely unperturbed, and Hannibal bites off a piece of bacon afterward as if to punctuate how unaffecting he finds it.  He swallows it and then says,  “We’ve killed people before. I imagine we will do so again, unless you’re contemplating a radical change of direction.”  A quick glance toward Will and away, and now he does sound vaguely - not sorry or guilty, precisely.  Nothing so normal.  But affected, in some way, as he adds, “I do apologize if he was someone you were fond of.  I hadn’t intended precisely what occurred.  I don’t think either of us were at our best that night.”

There’s an understatement.  Will stares down into his half-finished breakfast plate and his appetite flees.  _ Fond. _  Had he been fond of Jeremy?  No; there hadn’t been enough to it for that. But he hadn’t done anything wrong either, not even the petty rudenesses of their more usual prey.  He hadn’t deserved to have Will and Hannibal happen to him.

He can’t meet Hannibal’s eyes when he says, “I’d only just met him. But he didn’t deserve to get in the middle of what happens when you and I  _ aren’t at our best. _  It won’t happen again. I’ll… it just won’t.”  

“If you need companionship, Will--”

“ _ Stop. _ Just...stop”  Will’s hands are flying up and outward of their own volition in a helpless gesture to stop whatever terrible thing Hannibal’s about to say.  To offer him some sort of freedom that will never work - what, he’s going to bring someone home to this house and Hannibal’s going to serve tea and not stab anyone?  Will’s going to stay out nights and come home vaguely ashamed, to an awkward avoidant silence?

It doesn’t matter what Hannibal’s going to offer, what suggestion he’s going to make about where Will might find  _ companionship, _ because the horrible thing Will knows now is that it wouldn’t matter.  He’s fairly conclusively proved that picking up strangers is not going to scratch the particular itches he has, and developing some sort of actual relationship is not an option even if he wanted to.  Which he doesn’t.  All he wants is...well.  Things he can’t say out loud. Not even here, not even to Hannibal.

Hannibal sits watching him, obediently paused in mid-sentence, eyes pinning Will to the spot. Clean and neat in a sweater and slacks, and all Will can think of is how good he would look with blood spattered across that clean sweater, his face, the hand that rests lightly on the countertop.  All Will can think, although it has no place in this conversation, is that he still has the knife he took from Hannibal in the hotel room, and that he needs to give it back.  It’s still dark with Jeremy’s dried blood. The sensible thing to do would have been to clean it or to get rid of it but he couldn’t do either; he kept the wretched thing and he wants to see it back in Hannibal’s hand.

He presses his hand against his eyes and watches patterns form in the darkness behind his eyelids, wishing they would form some sort of sign or maybe an actual script for him to follow.  But guidance is not forthcoming, and he struggles on without it.

“Companionship isn’t the problem,” is what he finally manages to spit out.  “It’s what we do.  Killing people, the way we do.  It was starting to get confusing for me.  I was looking for a distraction and I chose badly.  Clearly.  I’ll try to find some distractions that don’t get anyone killed, or the two of us run out of town.”

He’s not sure what he expected in response, exactly, but it’s not the near-sympathy in Hannibal’s voice when he says, “My intention was never for our activities to make you unhappy.  Would you prefer that we stop?”

Will’s  _ "No" _ in response comes out so quickly and forcefully that it startles him, jerked free from his throat without any volition of his own behind it.  He hadn't intended to say it, and he's left feeling stunned and exposed like a fish flopping on a riverbank. 

The surprise is enough that it takes him a few moments to understand that the look that just flashed across Hannibal’s face was satisfaction, or perhaps what passes for mirth in Hannibal’s limited emotional repertoire.  A few more to understand that it was a trick question, the answer already known with a near-certainty.  

Will stares blankly at Hannibal for a minute and then, since Hannibal’s apparently poking to see what Will has to say when he’s unfiltered, he goes ahead and lets himself say, “You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?”

Somehow, that makes him feel better.  It makes things feel more normal, some degree of the tension bled out of the room and replaced with something a little more like the casual ease that had grown between them over the months since their escape.

He’s definitely seeing Hannibal’s version of amusement now, a half-smile and an utter lack of concern about the epithet.  “I’ve been accused of it before, yes,” he responds.  “But not usually due to a sincere offer to stop the offending behavior.  You  _ are _ a little confused, aren’t you?”

Will glares, and does not dignify that with a response.  Instead he digs down for a little bravery and says, “Those forts in my mind are starting to feel shaky. Things touching that should be separate. Wires crossed that shouldn’t be. Probably the kind of thing I should be consulting a psychiatrist about, if I knew one who wasn’t part of the problem.”

“Am I part of your problem, then?”  Hannibal’s amusement is held more or less in abeyance now, his voice silky-smooth and almost, Will thinks or imagines, faintly insinuating. As if he guesses more than he’s saying.  Will flushes hot at the thought. He’s not sure what’s worse, dragging this out of himself bit by raw bloody bit, or having it so apparent that it might already be known. 

_ Name me a single day in the last five years that you haven’t been part of my problem, _ he wants to snap, but he manages to contain himself.  It’s not really true or fair. Not anymore, not since they ran away together.

Instead he sighs and says only, “Yes. But it’s nothing you did, or need to stop doing.  I just need to get some things in my head straightened out. In the meanwhile, can we make a deal?  I’ll try not to do anything that might put any innocents in the line of a stabbing, and if I do fuck up somehow, you’ll talk to me  _ before  _ reaching for the sharp objects?”

Hannibal’s nod is barely there, a tiny incline of the head, but it’s enough.  Will lets out a slow breath and tries to let more of his tension uncoil.  A truce.  A breathing space.  He says, “Okay.  So let’s just...try that, for a while.  The “no unintentional stabbings” thing. We’ll have to hold off on doing anything intentional here for a while anyway, right?  We should lay low at least until things die down.”

Maybe on some level he knows what’s about to happen, because his stomach does a little somersault as soon as the words are out of his mouth, before Hannibal speaks.  Before Hannibal even blinks, before the corners of his mouth twitch slightly, before his eyes slide toward the basement door, just visible from where they’re sitting.

Before Hannibal says, “A low profile would be wise.  But I did bring you a housewarming gift, of a sort. Picked up on my way here, not locally.  It won’t keep, I’m afraid; it should be enjoyed in the next day or so.”  

Before he pauses and adds, “If you would prefer, you could spend the day exploring the city and leave me to my own devices at home. That might be simpler for you.”

Will bites back the urge to ask, “What the fuck did you  _ do, _ Hannibal?” because what’s the point?  Of  _ course _ Hannibal crossed state lines with some rude bastard shoved in his fucking car trunk.   Of  _ course _ he’s had them in the basement for, what, two days? Three?  Unwise and not his usual routine, but he was waiting for Will.  To give Will a  _ present. _

In Hannibal-speak, it’s practically an apology for his poor behavior, if Will can look past how completely fucked up it is.  Which is, he supposes, not really any more or less fucked up than anything else that passes between them.

But he’s being given an out.  He can go out for the day and Hannibal will finish off whoever’s down there and disappear the evidence.  And then there’ll be quiet, for weeks or even months, while they wait for the search for them to die down.  Time for Will to get a handle on himself.  Time to rebuild some sort of stability and to decide what comes next.

It’s a good idea.  He should take it. But Will’s not very good at doing the right thing, lately.

With the same heavy weight of inevitability in his stomach that he’d felt when the  _ Nola _ began her journey across the ocean, when he got into the police car despite the blood smeared on its windshield, or any of the other times he’s followed Hannibal willingly into the depths of a terrible idea, he hears himself say, “ _ Show me." _

Hannibal smiles like he’s been waiting his entire life to hear those two words.


End file.
